Irresistible Urge For Male Child Is Killing Nearly 250,000 Girls Under Five Each Year In India

Almost 239,000 girls under the age of five die in India each year due to gender bias. The cause of death is society’s preference for a male child and the subsequent neglect of a female child, a gender discrimination study has found.

The figure does not include those aborted simply for being female.

“Gender-based discrimination towards girls doesn’t simply prevent them from being born, it may also precipitate the death of those who are born,” said study co-author Christophe Guilmoto of the Paris Descartes University.

“Gender equity is not only about rights to education, employment or political representation, it is also about caring, vaccination, and nutrition of girls, and ultimately survival.”

The report is the first-of-its-kind to examine the number of deaths among girls under five in India at a district level, showing specific geographic patterns of avoidable female mortality across India's 640 districts.

Excess or avoidable mortality is the difference between observed and expected mortality rates.

Researchers used the UN population data from 46 countries to calculate the difference between the expected mortality rate for girls aged under five in areas of the world without gender discrimination and the reality inside India.

The study found that 29 out of 35 Indian states had excess mortality in girls under five. All India states and territories, apart from two, contained at least one district with excess mortality.

The average level of excess mortality in girls aged 0-4 in India between 2000-2005 was 18.5 per 1,000 live births, or close to a quarter of a million deaths a year. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) a scientific institute based in Austria, said that the problem was most pronounced in northern India, where the four largest states, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, accounted for two-thirds of the total excess deaths of infant girls under five.

Low level of education, high population densities and high birth rates in rural areas are the prime factors driving gender discrimination deaths.

In January, the Indian government said that there were more than 63 million women “missing” from its population and that 2 million go “missing” across age groups every year because of abortion of female fetuses, disease, neglect and inadequate nutrition.

The annual economic survey pointed that India’s preference for male child has produced a man-made demographic bubble of excess males, with a long-term impact on crime, human trafficking, the overall savings rate and the ability of these excess males to find brides.

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Indians have a meta son preference, which means that if they have girls, they’ll keep on having children until they get a boy.

India’s male child preference has not gotten better at improving socio-economic conditions. Instead, it has worsened. The problem does not only occur in poor rural families but also in middle and upper-middle classes, where a son is expected to carry on the family business or inherit property, all of which can legally be done by a girl.

In the northern farming states of Punjab and Haryana, for example, the sex ratio among infants to 6-year-old is 1,200 men per 1,000 women, even though they are among the wealthiest states.

“Perhaps the area where Indian society — and this goes beyond governments to civil society, communities, and households — needs to reflect on the most is what might be called ‘son preference’ where development is not proving to be an antidote,” the survey suggested.

Consequently, India has one of the most skewed sex ratios in the world.